The summary now reads: School shooting at Virginia Tech is deadliest mass murder in U.S. history.
I know it's just been changed to move the gun control debate, but I'd like to see it revised, again. It's just patently untrue: the worst mass murders in US history were white vigilantes acting against Native people and black people:
Here's a good overview from"Third Estate Sunday Review" from April 22:
There's no sense in the media making the Virginia Tech massacres any worse than they were -- the death toll was horrifying enough on its own of course. But most outlets seems to want to do just that. CBS Evening News' anchor Katie Couric called it the deadliest shooting in US history. NBC reporter Ann Curry called it the deadliest mass shooting in US history. By historical standards such statements are just incorrect. The 1873 Colfax Massacre of Black militia soldiers during Reconstruction left an estimated 105 dead. The Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne had a comparable death toll. Wounded Knee was a massacre of about 300. The 1921 killings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killings of African-Americans in what is often referred to as the Black Wall Street left dozens dead and so on. If that might not strike you as media seeming to make things worse then consider NBC's decision to air the video messages of the Virginia Tech killer who had mailed the network the materials before he embarked upon part of his killing spree. ..."-- Peter Hart, of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, in the headlines sections of CounterSpin (FAIR's radio show) which began airing last Friday.. (I couldn't find it when I tried to link, but the point stands)
And here's a "Native Perspective on Virginia Tech Headlines" that makes much the same point:
"The worst in U.S. history." Really? It is certainly the worst shooting on a college campus in modern U.S. history. But if we think it is the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history, then we are a singularly uneducated nation.
"I can't take one more of these headlines," said Joan Redfern, a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe who lives in Hollister. We met at First Street Coffee to talk while we scanned Internet stories. "Haven't any of these people ever heard of the Massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado, where Methodist minister Col. Chivington massacred between 200 and 400 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, most of them women, children, and elderly men?"
Chivington specifically ordered the killing of children, and when he was asked why, he said, "Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice."
At Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the U.S. 7th Cavalry attacked 350 unarmed Lakota Sioux on December 29, 1890. While engaged in a spiritual practice known as the "Ghost Dance," approximately 90 warriors and 200 women and children were killed. Although the attack was officially reported as an "unjustifiable massacre" by Field Commander General Nelson A. Miles, 23 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for the slaughter. The unarmed Lakota men fought back with bare hands. The elderly men and women stood and sang their death songs while falling under the hail of bullets. Soldiers stripped the bodies of the dead Lakota, keeping their ceremonial religious clothing as souvenirs.
To say the Virginia shooting is the worst in all of U.S. history is to pour salt on old wounds-it means erasing and forgetting all of our ancestors who were killed in the past," Redfern said. "The use of hyperbole and lack of historical perspective seems all too ubiquitous in much of the current mainstream media," Redfern said. "My intention is not to downplay the horror of what has happened this week in any way. But we have a 500-year history of mass shootings on American soil, and let's not forget it."
This is only the most recent mass shooting massacre in a long history of mass shootings in a country engaged in a long love affair with firearms and very little interest in gun control.
Let's not forget our history and the richness of our Native roots. While spending time on the 1.5 million acre Hopi Reservation in Arizona, I met families living in homes they have occupied for over 900 years. On the surface, it looks like a third world country: you will observe many homes without running water, travel unpaved roads, and notice that there are no building codes. But sitting in a Hopi home being served a delicious lunch cooked by a proud Hopi working mother, I experienced so much more: the continuity of a long and deep heritage, a sense of the sacred, an artistic expertise, and wisdom about many things that remain a mystery to my culture.
Most of all, may we never forget all those innocent civilian men, women, and children who lost their lives simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, just as the students happened to be this week in Virginia. May we always remember the precious humanity of these students, but may we also never forget the humanity of those who lost their lives simply for being born people Native to this country.
When a white institution experiences violence, particularly violence at the hands of a "brown" person, we are aghast, shocked, at levels that do simply make more galling our lack of shock, our expectation of violence in black neighborhoods and instituitons, or in "brown" countries--particularly the violence caused by white colonizers like the US government in a country like Iraq. We "expect" violence there, so we're not appalled. |
